Suncoast Holiday Treasures was my inspiration…

When I was younger, my mother had purchased two VHS tapes that had music and sights to get us into the spirit of the holidays. One was from Mannheim Steamroller and the other was released by Suncoast Motion Picture Company. Whenever we would go to the mall, we would stop-in that store at some point during our trip. That was a guarantee stop-in while shopping. I don’t remember my mother buying the tapes, but I do remember her bringing them home. While I enjoy the Mannheim Steamroller video cassette, it did not come close to the fun of the other one called Holiday Treasures which was released in 1991.

The Retroist himself told me he used to work at Suncoast and remembers this video. He said, “We would play them on the in-store TVs and they would move.”

This video had some fun Christmas songs. The very first on there was a very upbeat version of Sleigh Ride which seems like a very good choice for the first song in the video. The video itself is comprised of stock footage of people skiing, playing in the snow, some amateur footage of Christmas scenes like toy villages or what appears to be some Amish folk with their backs to the camera (they have their reasons, religious I believe). I remember wanting to see more of these type of videos, but these were the days before the internet was a widespread thing, so they were hard to find. Heck, even today, there isn’t that many out there, at least none as fun as this.

While researching some of this yesterday for the post, I found out that Suncoast made a second video a year later. Someone posted the whole thing on YouTube. I watched it. The reason I am not supplying you with a link is simple; it’s bad. If you want to see it for yourself, you’re on your own. As for the first video, I uploaded and now I wait for someone to tell me it has to come down. In the meantime, please enjoy it while you can.

I put a overlay around it so that if you do watch it on a TV, it will look somewhat presentable and not too pixelated when scaled up. If you have a 4K television set, then, there’s nothing I can do for that. You people and your crazy high definition technologies!

Remember I said I couldn’t find too many video likes this? Well, during the early 2000s, I started doing some video editing on a Windows XP machine using software called Pinnacle Studio and a piece of hardware that let me record video from a VCR/camcorder to the computer. During 2003, I kept telling myself to make my own video like Holiday Treasures and shortly after 2004 started, I began working on it.

It took months because of I wound up starting from scratch more than once. Also, the Gateway computer I was using at the time was painfully slow and I had to record everything from VHS tapes to the computer. Very time consuming. I wrote about this video of mine in the past, but if you like to watch it, click here. It contains scenes from some of the most popular holiday movies and cartoons we nostalgia fans love. And of course popular Christmas songs.

Seeker of 1980s nostalgia, rummager of vintage computers and player of retro video games.When not writing posts of The Retroist, I'm converting Retroist audio podcasts to Retroist video podcasts.My own videos can be found at www.YouTube.com/JustinSalvato.